Finally. After a few weeks of work I eventually finished my first full project. I did it all by myself because I wanted to touch every aspect of game development and learn as much as I can (by trial and error mostly but we all have to start somewhere, right?). Now I want jot down some notes - even if only as a reminder for my future self - on this very first attempt to make a full game from scratch.

So what went well?

First of all I pushed myself to finish my work, for good or the bad. Yeah, I’ve got plenty others that I’ll probably never touch again, this time, however, I decided I have to finish. It wasn’t easy, though. After initial excitement and motivation went away I realized I don’t really love this project and it takes lots of discipline and hard work to get thing done. There were things I really enjoyed and things I purely hated (more insights in a while) but I had to tackle them all to prove to myself that I can complete the task even if I don’t like parts of it. I asked myself ‘what needs to be done today?’ rather than ‘what would I like to do today?’

I’m quite happy about the graphics. I’m a big fan of pixel art and old games (I hope the game’s sprites at least resemble those from old jRPGs - FF VI for SNES in particular). However, I’m not (and I don’t think I’ll ever be) an artist but I tried to give my best. I’ve also learnt a thing or two down the road so the graphics will be better in my future games. I regret a little bit I didn’t have time to make animations.

I think my time management was quite good also, especially taking into account that I can dabble in gamedev only for 1-2 hours a day (I have a full-time job). At least this time I proved Pareto principle wrong - final 20% of development didn’t take 80% of overall development time. I also managed to divide my work into smaller chunks and settle some deadlines I almost met.

And what was not ok?

The mechanics. At first I was extremely excited I’d come up with simple mechanics based on sliding 8-puzzle. A bandit beats a civilian, an armed policeman takes out a bandit. Just add some graphics, a little plot and you’ve got a great puzzle game. NOPE. As the levels grew larger, quite a problem became apparent. To move a tile, at least 3 nearby tiles must be moveable. This limits level design GREATLY. No tricky narrow passages, no sudden dead ends, lots of space wasted. And to move aforementioned tile, sometimes you have to make 8 drags with a mouse! (note to self: keyboard controls could have helped here a little)

The plot is also a bit silly but I never pretended to be a writer/screenwriter/storyteller. In fact I came up with a story only to justify consecutive levels of the game. What I’m sure about is that my future games will definitely be more ‘theme-based’ rather than ‘story-driven’.

The last aspect I wanted to write about is music/sound. To me, the music in games falls into two categories - present and not present. So making one for my game was a hard task because I didn’t even know what should it sound like. Eventually I reached the heights of my musical abilities and spent half an hour to produce 3 ten seconds long samples to throw into the game as soundtrack. And I hated that half an hour so that I decided to use some royalty-free music next time.

Wow. Quite a log here. I think I haven’t written so much at once since high school. So if, by any chance, you’re still reading this - thank you for your time. If you happen to play my Puzzle Police - please leave some feedback on what you think was good & what was bad so I can improve in the future. Have a nice day! :)